Micro Focus announced a major release of its Service Management Automation product.

Service Management Automation-X (SMA-X) offers an engaging Service Experience, with a chatbot-powered virtual agent, a mobile application, integrated social networking, smart ticketing with Optical Character recognition and smart email.

In addition, SMA-X is a container-based, multi-tenant platform that enables organizations and Managed Service Providers (MSP) to cost-effectively address their most stringent SLAs. By allowing full data sovereignty, SMA-X customers and MSPs can ensure the security and location of their service data to meet data privacy and compliance requirements.

“The underlying advanced analytics and leading automation technology make Service Management Automation-X the easiest to use and easiest to manage solution on the market,” said Tom Goguen, SVP and GM, IT Operations Management, Micro Focus. “As the first modern container-based, multi-tenant service management platform, SMA-X gives customers the widest range of deployment options and is able to save customers millions compared with traditional SaaS and on-premise offerings.”

Key enhancements and capabilities to Service Management Automation-X include:

■ Container-Based Delivery – Provides customers true choice via a modern foundation to build and deploy advanced IT solutions — that can run in any environment. Through advanced data management capabilities, customers get flexibility coupled with complete control of their data sovereignty.

■ Runs on the Public Cloud – Offers the ability to install and work with Service Management Automation-X instances deployed on the Amazon Web Services ecosystem, enabling customer’s greater flexibility to run and store their applications and data.

■ Codeless and Version-less Configuration – Accelerates onboarding and reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through automated upgrades giving customers almost instant access to new features and capabilities.

■ Modern User Experience – Gives the consumer the simplest service experience driven by analytics and automation.
- Native mobile application complements the web service portal with a streamlined, native interface that focuses on key tasks that need to be managed on the go.
- Virtual agents provide automated assistance with integrated live-chat or email to enhance continuous customer support.
- Social collaboration features including ability to vote, translation on the fly, “ask a friend,” or survey to help end-users source answers from the community and enhance end-user autonomy.
- ChatOps bots enable collaboration between service agents and tools, resulting in faster resolutions and improving knowledge reuse.

■ Multi-tenant Managed Service Provider Support – Brings industry-leading multi-tenancy and high scalability, with deployment flexibility across on premise and cloud for global and regional Managed Service Providers.

■ Additional Enterprise Applications – Adds an array of analytics based applications—including operational project management, human resource workflow, application and service portfolio management, financial tracking, ideation and proposal management—to the existing catalog of service management applications.

■ Change and Hot Topics Analytics – Uses industry-leading IDOL analytics to improve change management and service agents.

■ Enhanced Smart Ticketing Analytics – Features the industry’s first Optical Character Recognition and machine learning system to accept and route service requests.

The result is service management that attracts end-users and customers, offers them solutions quickly and easily, and connects them with agents and automated processes that are smart and efficient.

Service Management Automation -X is available in November 2017 with future updates expected to be delivered on a quarterly release cycle.